On the air, around the world
AFTER 50 YEARS, CFMB operates in more than a dozen languages – a ‘miniature UN’ connecting cultures
“We’re not a momand-pop operation,” Stefan Stanczykowski says of the multilingual ethnic radio station he runs, CFMB 1280 AM. “A lot of people think we’re in a basement with a turntable.”
If you look at it literally, CFMB is a family affair. It was launched 50 years ago this month by Stanczykowski’s father, Casimir. Its studios actually are in a basement, of a building on York St. in Westmount. And I spotted a turntable in there when I visited this week.
But his larger point remains: CFMB is not a small operation. It has 52 people working for it, between fulltimers, part-timers and independent producers. It has professional studios putting out more than 100 hours of local programming every week. And its 50,000-watt signal reaches as far as Quebec City and Ottawa.
The station might never have got off the ground half a century ago had it not been for the persistence of Casimir Stanczykowski, a Polish immigrant and Second World War survivor who, the legend says, began working to launch the station in 1957 on a bet.
Casimir Stanczykowski needed three applications and almost five years before the Board of Broadcast Governors — the predecessor to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — would grant him a licence for a multilingual radio station. CFMB finally went on the air on Dec. 21, 1962.
He ran the station until he died in a car accident in 1981, leaving the operation to his wife, Annick, and partner Andrew Mielewczyk. Stefan Stanczykowski started working there in 1999, while he studied marketing and then law in university.
He joined the station’s board of directors in 2004 (the company is still majority owned by his father’s estate), and became its lawyer in 2008 and its director in 2011. He also ran unsuccessfully for the Coalition Avenir Québec in the last provincial election, finishing second in Mount Royal riding.
Throughout its life, the station has operated in more than a dozen languages. Italian, which is the fourth-most common mother tongue in Montreal after French, English and Arabic, takes up by far the largest chunk, from 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. weekdays, plus Saturday and Sunday mornings.
CFMB also carries programming for the Algerian, Brazilian, Cambodian, Chinese, Greek, Haitian, Jewish, Latin-American, Lithuanian, Pakistani, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Ukrainian communities.
“We’re like a miniature United Nations,” Michael Tellides, who produces the station’s Greek programming, says.
Stanczykowski doesn’t know exactly how big his station’s audience is. BBM Canada, which compiles radio and television ratings, measures them only in terms of the English and French audience. Ethnic broadcasters who have subscribed to BBM’s ratings quickly stopped paying for them because they couldn’t accurately measure multilingual audiences.
In any case, CFMB’s audience is better measured in quality than quantity. “We have a very loyal listener base,” Stanczykowski says.
“It’s like they know us,” says Silvana Di Flavio, who co-hosts the mid-morning Italian program weekdays with Nick De Vincenzo. “Many of them remember things like our birthdays or the day I got married. They know our jingle and can sing it for us.”
Much of CFMB’s program- ming reflects the closely knit nature of its communities. In addition to local news and information, you’ll hear announcements about wedding anniversaries or upcoming marriages. Once or twice a week, the station will set up a remote broadcast to meet its listeners in person.
As a result, it has a loyal advertising base, too. Some advertisers have been with the station almost since the beginning.
The support helps CFMB be a strong force for charity. It raises tens of thousands of dollars every year for charitable causes close to the communities it serves, including $10,000 for the Montreal Children’s and Ste-Justine hospitals during its 50th-anniversary celebration on Nov. 9. And whenever there’s a disaster overseas, like an earthquake in Italy or Greece, the station organizes relief.
“We’re trying to help as much as we can,” Tellides says. His team has helped round up food, clothes and money to send to Greece as the country struggles through a fiscal crisis.
On the air, Tellides keeps 90 per cent of his shows’ content local, understand- ing that with satellite TV and the Internet, his listeners can easily get news directly from Greek sources. “I’m not going to try to copy and paste what’s happening in Greece,” he says. Instead, he’s a source for news and discussion for the Greek community in Montreal, like a “Greek CJAD.”
Tellides is one of CFMB’s veterans. “Stefan was not even born when I started,” he notes of his young boss. Since joining the station in 1969, Tellides has seen his community change. “In
“If we have a small part in conveying our culture to future generations, that’s very fulfilling.”
the 1960s, small entrepreneurs opened (businesses) like mushrooms all over the place,” he says. But now, “the small guy is fading.”
Instead, “our kids are educated, professionals. There are 2,000 Greek doctors here.”
Both Tellides and Di Flavio see the station’s role as preserving culture, which becomes more important as new generations abandon their parents’ foreign languages and become anglophones and francophones.
“I believe when you keep the language, you keep the culture,” Tellides says. He was born in Egypt to Greek parents, and he figures whoever succeeds him in his role “is probably someone who was born here, whose mother tongue is not Greek.”
Di Flavio, who was born here and joined the station out of university in 1993, is part of that next generation. Her parents speak to each other in Italian and always had the Italian radio shows on in the kitchen when she was growing up, but she communicates with her husband mainly in English.
“The older generation will always be tuned in no matter what we’re doing,” Di Flavio says. But CFMB has to work hard to attract a younger audience in order to survive another 50 years.
Di Flavio points to Super-Fantastico, an annual American Idol-like talent competition for young Italian Canadians that she and De Vincenzo have run for the past 18 years. “This is how we keep the younger generation interested,” she says.
Keeping language alive is the best way to preserve culture, and preserving different cultures is the ultimate goal of CFMB.
“If we have a small part in conveying our culture to future generations, that’s very fulfilling,” Di Flavio says.